Theater

His Jewish Question

Growing up Jewish in New York City as Hitler’s nascent Reich stirred the currents of American anti-Semitism, Arthur Miller experienced the wounds of irrational hatred. The playwright recalls the awakening that led him to write his taboo-breaking 1945 novel, Focus, which inspired Neal Slavin’s movie, due out this month, starring William H. Macy, Laura Dern, and David Paymer.

This month a film opens that is small and durable and rare, a tiny cinematic jewel. Based on the 1945 novel by playwright Arthur Miller, Focus (starring William H. Macy, Laura Dern, and David Paymer; directed by Neal Slavin; produced by New York mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg) pivots on one chilling, Kafkaesque transformation. At the height of the Second World War, a meek executive at a faceless Manhattan company is taken to task by his supervisor for having extremely poor eyesight. The boss demands that his employee start wearing glasses, immediately. The next morning, fitted with new spectacles, the bureaucrat is shunned as “Jewish-looking” by everyone around him, including his own mother. Because of this one innocuous act, an entire life implodes.

Here, Arthur Miller, now 85, discusses the undercurrents of anti-Semitism in America in the 1940s, and the matrix of factors—personal, social, and political—that compelled him, 56 years ago, to write this haunting tale of romance and malevolence.

Nothing in history really repeats itself. Which is not to say that the same types of people don’t re-appear from era to era. Over time the cast of characters, indeed, is fairly changeless, and some of the underlying forces as well: greed is forever, public hysteria and the denial of what is happening, demagoguery, senseless cruelties, heroic resistance to these villainies—the ingredients, to be sure, are finite. But the details of the story and their unpredictability make the old seem brand-new when it crops up again.

I wrote the novel Focus at a particular moment. I wanted to expose to the light what I intimately knew about a topic that was largely unreported. The book went into many editions, and continues to do so more than half a century later, but initially the standard publishers would not touch it. A new house, New York’s Reynal & Hitchcock, and a young and adventurous editor, Frank Taylor, brought it out and held their breaths when it first appeared, waiting for the explosion.

Focus deals with what were all but forbidden subjects at the time: American anti-Semitism and the threat of violence underlying it. This was the early 40s. Nazi forces were driving their way through Europe as its great armies, those of France and England, were fleeing or under siege. Fascism—what Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the heroic flier and herself a pilot and best-selling author, called an expression of “the wave of the future”—had the magic touch that caused all resistance to evaporate. Soon, even its arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, would move into its camp. And the foundation of Fascism was race hate.

If Fascism had a political program, let alone a solution to the worldwide Depression, which none of the democracies had been able to cure, it was to militarize society and put millions in uniform. Its one idea (if it can be called that)—its veritable banner, which it unfurled everywhere—declared that the Jews were the cause of every imaginable misfortune. This ancient, magical formula was not too hard for even an idiot to grasp, and so the Jewish people, as they had been innumerable times since Christianity began, were up for sacrifice, their destruction required before the promise of social progress for non-Jews could take place. In medieval times, when plague had struck down whole populations, it was the Jews who were blamed, even as they were infected and continued from page 327 died like everyone else. In short, the strength of anti-Semitism was its illogic, its supernatural nature.

Like most others in New York back then, I had run into anti-Semitism as a rather normal feature of everyday life, uncomfortable to be sure, since I was Jewish, but not pointedly dangerous except for one incident in 1939, a world away from the city, in the backwoods of North Carolina. I was there recording the rich variety of Carolina speech patterns for the folklore division of the Library of Congress, a unit devoted to preserving and documenting the nation’s music, mythology, speech, and many aspects of popular life going back to the country’s beginnings. My driver and I were looking down through the windshield of our government delivery van from the edge of a deep marble quarry where, far below us, men were working. I wanted to record the speech of those men, if I could only locate the road down to them. I happened to turn my head and looked into the octagonal barrel of an enormous shotgun a couple of feet from my eyes. It was wavering because, as I now noticed, a worried woman, beside the fat, middle-aged gunman, was pulling on his arm, apparently to dissuade him from killing me. “Get out of here right now, you Jew son of a bitch!” he growled. My driver, Johnny Langeneger, bless him, put the van in reverse, and we did probably 30 miles an hour going backward along a narrow, wooded road.

It might be asked how this citizen knew I was Jewish. The door of the green van was emblazoned in gold lettering with the seal of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the gunman, no doubt, was among the not inconsiderable number of Americans who believed that Jews ran Washington, and, indeed, that Roosevelt’s real name was Rosenfeld. If frequent photos showed the president entering or leaving an Episcopal church, they only proved once again how wily the Jews were in camouflaging themselves. Even his so-called polio was a fake; it was really syphilis which had crippled him, as it had so many other Jews, who were famously irrepressible sexually. Witness the blatant exploitation of sex by Hollywood moguls, and by Sigmund Freud, whose writings on “infantile sexuality” contended that everyone, not excluding babies and their mothers, had sexual feelings.

I had lived the usual New York life on the subways, on the streets, on the job. I had driven a truck and pushed hand trucks on Seventh Avenue. I usually swam in Coney Island and in the early 1940s had worked as a shipfitter’s helper in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. (Among its 60,000 workers were members of every ethnic group in the area, probably more Italians than any other.) Having been immersed in the New York mind-set, I would finally give up trying to argue rationally about how selfishly antisocial Jews were, on the one hand, and, conversely, how they generously stuck together to help one another in a kind of plot to secure their survival, unlike others who, unable to compete, were jumping out of windows or dying of drink. The twists and turns of the anti-Semitic fantasy were limitless. For me, finally, the problem came down to having to prove that one was not really and truly a form of walking poison gas. Difficult when, for example, the great universities—Yale, Harvard, and Columbia among them—were openly enforcing a numerus clausus (fixed ceiling) on Jewish admissions. One knew bright medical students who had had to go to Scotland to study, American medical schools being closed to them as Jews.

Things were beginning to get scary in the late 30s when one of the most popular radio shows in America was that of a Father Charles Coughlin, a Royal Oak, Michigan, priest. Every Sunday afternoon Coughlin preached the evils of the Jews and even used the texts, uncredited, of speeches by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, denouncing the Jews.

I had had to develop a hard shell to escape a certain kind of paranoid despair in the atmosphere of 30s New York. I had once answered a “Boy Wanted” ad in the Sunday New York Times for a shipping clerk’s job at Chaddick-Delamater, a large auto-parts warehouse located where Lincoln Center now stands, which at that time was an industrial slum neighborhood. I was encouraged to apply not only by the $15-a-week salary, three times more than the usual “Boy” job paid, but also because unlike most other ads this one did not specify “Christian” or “Gentile firm,” or simply “Chr.” or “Cath.” or “Prot.”

Bright and early on Monday morning, I was interviewed by the manager of Chaddick-Delamater. I had often picked up parts there for Shapse Auto Supply in Long Island City, whose owner, my best friend’s father, later had to let me go when business dwindled to nearly zero. I called Mr. Shapse to happily report that I had just been interviewed for this job at Chaddick’s, and in a peculiarly somber tone he asked me to keep him informed about my progress. When no word came next day from Chaddick’s manager, I called to tell Mr. Shapse, who said he would inquire; Chaddick’s had never hired a Jew, he said, even though most of their local parts dealers were Jewish.

Next day, magically, I was called by the manager, who said I was hired. I worked there for a couple of years until I’d saved enough to go to college. Most of the workers in the place were Irish, with a few of German background, all of them Catholic. I can’t say that I became close friends with them—their clan was too tight—but neither was there any open hostility. Dora Haggerty, one of the women in the front office, told me she admired Jews because they made good husbands, which she hoped her young nephew Carl would turn out to be. She was very sweet, very thin, and very unmarried, but I was grateful for her admiration.

I would emphasize that none of this was alarming in itself. Indeed, these impediments, if they can be called that, were more like challenges to be overcome than dire warnings of danger that might overwhelm. Jews expected obstacles and they were not alone in this regard. The Irish, well into the early decades of the century, had had a tough time entering any but the lowest levels of America’s business and political circles; unlike the Jewish deity, their God was the same one the Protestant majority worshiped. As for black people at the time, most had simply been locked out, at the edges of the white working world.

In my two years on that job I kept trying to imagine myself as really no different than the others, but some membrane persisted between them and me. It was a mystery I could not solve. Most of the time, I thought of other things, such as how to get through the day cooped up in that warehouse, especially in good weather.

By 1938, the year I got my college degree, my habitual optimism (born, I suppose, of an awareness of an ability to write plays) was shaken by the news of Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ Night of Broken Glass across Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland. Uniformed Germans, under government sponsorship, had burned synagogues, beaten and humiliated Jews, and this obviously signaled worse to come. Notwithstanding Hitler’s having taken power several years before, my inherited view of Germany as a civilized nation had persisted, due, no doubt, to my grandfather’s Eastern European respect for Germans in contrast to Russians and Poles. That a nation of such high cultural repute could embrace this kind of savagery opened up new and bloody prospects before me, and not in Germany but here in America. Now the everyday slights and threats against me—and against Jews in general—began to swell as portents.

Focus was possibly the first American novel about anti-Semitism, although Gentleman’s Agreement (Laura Hobson’s book on the same theme, which was later adapted for the screen by director Elia Kazan, winning best-picture honors in 1947) may have beaten it out by a few weeks. If Focus had grown out of my general experiences in Brooklyn and Manhattan, one incident in particular may have forced me to try to write it.

I had an acquaintance who actually owned a car, an unusual thing among my set, especially a car that ran. He had a steady girlfriend as well, also unusual, and they invited me for a drive in the country one Sunday afternoon. We crossed the then new George Washington Bridge and drove into New Jersey, and, as unshockable as I was at that time, I felt a blow inside my head on seeing a small sign at the driveway entrance to a country hotel that read: restricted clientele, christian. Personally, I wouldn’t have even dreamed of renting a hotel room, but the idea of being forbidden to so much as enter the place somehow exploded something in my brain. It was like being shot at. The hatred in that little sign was indigestible. I suppose this indisposition was helped along by the fact that I was not always taken for a Jew. In short, there was an absurdity here that, like the pearl-seeding grain of sand in an oyster, started to accrete scenes around it, and the book began to form.

Could anything like this situation ever develop again in America? Certainly not in the same way, when the world today is so vastly different. Or is it? Not when one looks at ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, murderous hatred of gays in some American places, of blacks in others, and the undertow of persistent racist feelings in so many minds here and in other parts of the world. But, at the same time, more people than ever seem to be aware of the dissolution of civil societies that anti-Semitism has led to in Europe and elsewhere. Still, the world has been at odds with how to deal with the Jews for two millennia now, and one has to doubt that the dilemma has been resolved. In Europe one hears of a recrudescence of anti-Jewish feeling set off by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the depth of this sentiment has yet to be measured. I may doubt or even dismiss the possibility of a repeat of the past, but I have to recognize that the answer is objectively unknowable. In the meantime, Focus—the story of two unlikely lovers caught in the swirling tides of that era, written not after the fact but in the midst of the period’s turmoil—is the way we were, difficult to understand as some of our behavior may now appear. It is the raw evidence, unalloyed by any later wisdom or healing, at least as one young man saw it over half a century ago.